Web browsers are fast becoming standard issue in the American office. Exact
figures are hard to find, but at least one study estimates the number of
workplace Internet connections has nearly tripled in the last year and a half,
to 13 million. That growth doesn't come without misgivings on the part of
managers, and some of them are taking a closer look at just what it is their
employees are doing when they spend all those hours surfing the Web. Minnesota
Public Radio's Martin Kaste reports.

Welcome to Celebrity Slugfest, one of the thousands of useful Internet sites
available to America's office worker. This particular site lets you go
mano-a-mano with a celebrity sparring partner - Bill Gates, for example:

SFX: Bill Gates gets knocked out

Managers have nightmares about scenes like this: companies spend thousands -
maybe hundreds of thousands - hooking their employees up to the Internet, and
for what? Fantasy football, joke e-mail and the ever-popular porn sites.
Managers have become so worried about employees wasting time on the 'net, it's
fueling a whole new software business. Phil Nieray is director of
product marketing for On Technology, a Massachusetts company that sells system
software to big Internet users:

They're concerned that their bandwidth is being used for inappropriate use,
and they want to know what's going on.

On Technology's customers have been snapping up a new program called "On-Guard
Internet Manager," which allows employers to log all the Internet traffic coming
in and out of a workplace, then analyze it by type, or even scan it for
tell-tale keywords such as "sex" or "monster trucks." Other, competing software
products on the market allow employers to block employee access to certain
sites, or even scan e-mail for bad words. But Nieray says most employers just
want the ability to see what their employees are doing:

Once people know that there's a possibility that their employer can see where
they're going on the Web, they tend to self-censor or self-monitor, rather than
wait for their employer to find out they've been using the Web
inappropriately.

One of Nieray's customers, Madison Gas & Electric, in Madison, Wisconsin,
reports that's exactly what happened. Information Security Specialist Debbie
Curtain says the Internet Manager has caught very few cases of abuse among the
company's 400-plus employees who have Internet connections:

We probably haven't used it as much as I would have thought. But knowing
that it's there, I think people are little more cautious.

But the monitoring software might be lulling managers into a false sense of
security. "John X." is a twenty-something office worker for a Minneapolis-based
manufacturing company. He says he gets all his work done, and often has enough
time left over to spend half his workday surfing the Web. His favorite sites are
newsgroups - free-form discussions of favorite hobbies or rock bands. John's
company put a software block on newsgroups as non-work-related, but John easily
found a way to get around it.

Management has no clue about technology, at all, really. They wouldn't
know where to start if they tried to censor or control what we're doing.

Some companies try to stop Web-savvy twenty-somethings like John X by hiring
other twenty-somethings to run their monitoring system. But even an experienced
Webmaster like Dave Micko, who's policed the Internet connections of some of
the Twin Cities largest companies, thinks monitoring is a losing battle:

Sure they can filter out a certain percentage of porn sites, for example. But
new porn sites pop up on a daily basis, and they know that there are these
companies trying to filter them. There are ways to get around these things,
and due to the basic nature of the Internet, there's no way to filter content
100%, in a technological sense.

Micko says he's seen too many technologically-ignorant managers leap at the
promise of a technological fix - something he finds ironic, and
self-defeating.

They don't know how to deal with it. And a company comes along and says "I
know how to do deal with it, just subscribe to my software package, and here are
the categories you can subscribe to," and bang, they you are. It's almost like
they're giving them a tech solution for what I would argue is a managerial
problem.

Managers who do monitor their employees' use of the Internet often hesitate to
act on what they find, for fear of alienating their employees. John X., for
example, says he'd quit his job if management tried to ban personal use of the
Internet:

It's so complicated to tell when you're working, when you're doing something
personal, when something personal becomes work-related. It's all so
complicated.

Given the good job market, employees like John X. can afford to demand Internet
privileges, and employers are in no position to be stingy. University of
Minnesota Professor Les Wanniger studies the way companies cope with new
technologies, and he says employees have a habit of getting the tools they want,
with or without the approval of management. He says he understands the appeal of
the monitoring systems, but he says they're a dead-end:

Could I make a business out of software to monitor people.
Sure. And could I sell it to lots and lots of companies? Sure. In five years
from now, companies that did it will decide, well, we're smarter now.

Wanniger says sooner or later, managers will come to the same conclusion about
the Internet that they did about PCs and telephones: that surveillance is
costly and even counter-productive. Eventually, he says, the Internet - along
with other high-tech trends, like telecommuting - will force companies to give
up trying to look over employees' shoulders and evaluate their performance by
tracking outcomes.